physics
Anti-gravity and unlimited energy
It seems sheer impracticality or the laws of physics haven't stopped the patent office from granting an Indiana man named Boris a patent for an anti-grav device (well, vehicle we assume). If you're going to create anti-grav you're going to need an endless supply of energy, so you might want to call Randell Mills. Mills claims to have discovered a new energy source by changing the orbital distance of the electron in hydrogen. Quantum physicists aren't too pleased about that one. Hmm, (scratching chin) bets I'll hear about either of these ever again? (I thought cold fusion was going to save us.)Evidence of Strangelets
Maybe not living in a trailer park in Florida, as first believed. But imagine a grain of sand the mass of a truck, and travelling a million miles an hour. Why care? Well, if a couple hit the Earth, someone\'s gonna notice. Second, they may provide evidence of dark matter.Synchronicity? Quantum Entanglement? Or...
...plain old wishful thinking. A Princeton study, Engineering Anomalies Research, claims to test the effects of the human mind on machines, conclusion being that there is something weird going on. Wired reports: "If their claims are to be taken seriously in science, they have to be replicated," Jeffers said. "If they can't be replicated, it doesn't mean they're false, but science rapidly loses interest." Well, we know how tricky so-called natural randomness may seem on closer examination. Or, maybe there really is a robot god, and it's giving us hints at our robot overrlord future through binary backflips. Or perhaps your PC really does just hate you (most likely).Catching neutrinos
Thousands of tons of steel, 200,000-amp pulses, a football field length detector 2,450 feet below the earth -- sounds big, but it's all about the very small. A neutrino, ten-millionth the mass of an electron or less, are tough to spot since they're small enough to pass through everything. Of the uncountable that pass through the earth, and the very many the MINOS experiment plan on shooting at a detector, to catch a few is extrememly difficult. Why catch them? Neutrinos leave the sun's core, for instance, immediately, whereas the rest of the energy takes epochs to go from core to surface; they can also tell us about other events such as supernova and more generally about the mass of the universe or darkmatter.Splashless w/out atmosphere
From the lowly raindrop to the advanced coffee ring -- a University of Chicago scientist has realized that there is no splash from a drop of liquid hitting a flat surface without atmosphere. You can see this demonstrated quite beautifully in slow-mo.
